Organizations are increasingly deploying applications on virtual machines (VMs) to improve Information Technology (IT) efficiency and application availability. A key benefit of adopting virtual machines is that they can be hosted on a smaller number of physical servers (VM servers). Today, many virtualization platforms (e.g., Microsoft Hyper-V Server) allow a user to create a point-in-time snapshot or saved state (also referred to as checkpoint) of a VM at any stage. Such checkpoint can subsequently be applied to revert to a previous state of the VM, thereby allowing a user to undo any catastrophic changes to the environment and reverting to a stable machine state when the checkpoint was created.
Unfortunately, handling of checkpoints in a backup process generally requires many steps to achieve consistency at all stages and maintain a valid disk chain. At the same time, presence of checkpoints in a target VM creates data overheads that can increase the processing time of a backup operation.